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‘I’ve seen him shred people.’ The guy taking over for Steve Jobs is no pushover

“I’ve seen him shred people. He asks questions he knows you can’t answer and he keeps going and going.”

Apple's incoming CEO Tim Cook (left) and outgoing CEO Steve Jobs at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, Calif, in 2010. &ldquo;In meetings he's known for long, uncomfortable pauses, when all you hear is the sound of his tearing the wrapper of the energy bars he constantly eats,&rdquo; CNN wrote of Cook. (KIMBERLY WHITE / REUTERS)

Google vice-president for engineering Vic Gundotra reflected Thursday on an urgent cellphone call from Jobs one Sunday to insist that the hue of yellow on one of the O’s in Google wasn’t just right.

“So Vic, we have an urgent issue, one that I need addressed right away,” Gundotra said Jobs told him.

“I’ve already assigned someone from my team to help you, and I hope you can fix this tomorrow. I’ve been looking at the Google logo on the iPhone and I’m not happy with the icon. The second O in Google doesn’t have the right yellow gradient. It’s just wrong and I’m going to have Greg fix it tomorrow. Is that okay with you?”

It was, Gundotra wrote on the Google+ site, “a lesson I’ll never forget. CEOs should care about details. Even shades of yellow. On a Sunday.”

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Jobs’ legendary obsession with detail and secrecy were two ingrained Apple traits that some industry observers saw receding just a little the day after the 56-year-old founder stepped down as CEO.

“Software engineers work on big boxes and hardware engineers never see the software that will run on their machines — less than a dozen people had actually seen an actual iPhone before Steve unveiled it at Macworld 2007.”

A Time magazine article described One Infinite Loop, the Apple Cupertino, Calif., headquarters, after Jobs returned as CEO in 1997:

“Executives feed deliberate misinformation into one part of the company so that any leak can be traced back to its source.” Employees “are monitored by cameras, and they must cover up devices with black cloaks and turn on red warning lights when they are uncovered.”

The other Steve – Wozniak, who with Jobs’ created Apple in Jobs’ parents garage in 1976 – said Being Steve Jobs took its toll.

“He really has had to sacrifice a lot to run Apple,” Wozniak told Byte.com shortly after Jobs announced that his role at Apple would be confined to Chairman of the Board.

“Steve needs now to just have some 'Steve time,' Wozniak said.

“He was surrounded by great, great people at Apple . . . and those people are still there,” Wozniak said. “I don't think the core Apple culture will change because of (Jobs') leaving, not for a long time.”

New CEO Tim Cook has been running Apple’s daily operations since January when Jobs went on his third medical leave. He’d first stepped up to the job in 2004, when Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

Cook, 51, was in charge when the iPad 2 was unveiled, when iCloud was announced, and when Apple, two weeks ago, briefly became the world’s most valuable company.

Before that, Cook restructured Apple’s manufacturing methods and its supply chain. He is, by all accounts, a logistics maestro.

“You kind of want to manage it like you're in the dairy business,” he was quoted as saying in a CNN 2008 profile. “If it gets past its freshness date, you have a problem.”

And he has his own nascent cult of personality.

“In meetings he's known for long, uncomfortable pauses, when all you hear is the sound of his tearing the wrapper of the energy bars he constantly eats,” CNN wrote. One executive was quoted as saying, “I’ve seen him shred people. He asks questions he knows you can’t answer and he keeps going and going.”

A tidy, often-repeated Cook story has him remarking at a meeting on Asia’s terrible distribution network, “Somebody should be in China driving this” and then, 30 minutes later, asking operations executive Sabihh Khan, “Why are you still here?” As the story goes, Khan left the meeting immediately to grab a plane to China, without even a change of clothes.

As low-key as Jobs is a showman, Cook has made clear he’s steeped in the philosophy of Apple, which he joined in 1998, when “the company was commonly thought to be on the verge of extinction,” he said in a 2010 commencement speech at his alma mater, Auburn University.

“The word ‘complete’ is not in our dictionary,” he said at the Goldman Sachs tech conference in San Francisco in 2010. “We’re innovators. Which means many times we end up ‘obsoleting’ ourselves.

“We say no to great ideas every day. And we do that in order to keep the amount of things we focus on very small so that we can put all our energy behind the ones we do choose.”

Steve Jobs’ Apple “has never been afraid to cannibalize its own business,” said MSNBC tech writer Wilson Rothman. “The iPhone eats more and more into iPod sales every quarter. The iPad is a low-prices alternative to a Mac. One of the things Jobs’s rivals will never be able to stomach is his ability to make his own products obsolete.”

Jobs helped change computers from a geeky hobbyist’s obsession to a necessity of modern life at work and home, and in the process he upended not just personal technology but the cellphone and music industries, theAssociated Press reported.

The Apple II hit the market in 1977, making Jobs a multi-millionaire by age 25. The Macintosh exploded onto the scene in 1984 and then, in 1998, came the candy-coloured iMacs, which sold about 2 million its first year.

In this century, iTunes changed the way people bought music, and the iPhone changed the way they communicated. Jobs’ career, said The Mac Observer, has been “a revolution every other year.”

Indeed, the day before Jobs stepped down, a Japanese website reported Apple was working on a new Mac line that would be “completely different” from anything on the market now.

“No one can replace Steve Jobs, but (Cook) is good at what he does, which is make sure the right people have the right jobs,” said Jeff Gamet, managing editor at The Mac Observer.

“It’s not like as of today everything for Apple changes. It’s going to feel a little different, though, because Steve won’t have the CEO title.”

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